


a good ending

by corvidity



Category: Gintama
Genre: Families of Choice, Found Family, Gen, Healing, Light Angst, M/M, Post-Canon, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-07 12:45:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12841452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corvidity/pseuds/corvidity
Summary: Katsura tries to find somewhere to stay after the war, and is successful in more ways than one.





	a good ending

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Liatheus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liatheus/gifts).



> Happy (very late) Birthday, my dear friend! Thank you so much for your late-night and early morning companionship. You’ve made fandom life far more interesting and exciting than I ever thought possible, and it’s all happened in such a short space of time I kind of can’t believe how lucky I am. 
> 
> This fic assumes Gintoki was the one to deal the killing blow to Utsuro.

Katsura picks his way around what remains of Kabukicho knowing none of this is ever “going back to normal” any time soon, if ever. “Normal” might have lost all meaning too, not that it held much water even before Utsuro. The abnormality brought by the undead (and now dead) man is the kind Katsura knows, instinctively, lasts generations. The rebuilding effort will take months, stretch fresh wounds into scars over years.

Walking past stores and restaurants once vibrant with life, and seeing the grey pallor of dust over the ruins, he struggles to remember this is where he lives. Utsuro’s legacy. But that man is gone, he reminds himself. Vanquished. No. This time their enemy had worn the face of an old friend, sowed so much destruction. What victory is there to savour, who is the fallen enemy over which to gloat?

He stops dead at the entrance of maybe the sole convenience store in operation, a cool gust of air flooding from the sliding doors. The heat at his back feels like the better choice; the heat creeping up his neck momentarily stalling his tongue.  

“Gintoki?”

The head turns. The fish eyes stare. “Last I checked, that was my name.”

His former comrade (twice over) is standing in queue, a basket in hand. The other customers, Kabukicho regulars, slide indifferent eyes over him. Nothing unusual about a former rebel parading about.

“Zura,” continues Gintoki, supremely unperturbed.

“It’s not Zura, it’s Katsura.” He stops, frowns. “Far be it that I am unhappy to see you, but… what are you doing here?”

“What does it look like? How am I supposed to survive just on sukonbu?” The items in the basket rattle.  

Katsura almost envies the ease with which Gintoki moves, that lithe, graceful, _vulgar_ way he slouches over and picks his nose, ignoring the aghast expression spreading across Katsura’s face. “What?” he drawls. “Never seen anyone pay for anything before?”

Katsura draws himself to his full height, tilting his chin up. “Speak for yourself. You’ve never paid your rent _or_ Leader and Shinpachi-kun.”

Having reached the head of the queue, Gintoki’s attention turns elsewhere, and Katsura takes the chance to slip away into one of the aisles. By the time he returns to the front of the store, bottle of water in hand, the silver samurai is nowhere in sight.

Katsura pays and goes on his way, back out into the crucible of a war-torn Kabukicho yet to rise from the ashes.

*

Katsura doesn’t have a place to stay, and most hotels and inns aren’t open due to extensive damage. He manages to rent a poky room with limited hot water and ratty curtains, the landlord a stingy little man whose sour, bitter heart seems to be the only thing preserving his shrivelled body.

“Young man,” he scolds Katsura after he asks (very politely, he might add) for new blankets due to the bed bugs, “I suffered worse in the first Joui war. You couldn’t have been more than a teenager then, far away from the front lines. We ate and slept in the open with far worse than _bed bugs_ for company.”

Gritting his teeth, Katsura beats a strategic retreat. Runaway Kotaro, they called him. He won’t run away now, but he knows when there is no chance of winning an argument against someone who won’t be convinced.

The nights grow steadily warmer with the approaching summer, and the putrid stench of burst sewerage mains intensifies. The occasional corpse in the rubble reveals itself by the stink, and although the streets were scrubbed clean almost immediately, stale iron still curls at the back of his mouth some nights when the humidity hangs heavy.  

This war was shorter but bloodier, and the casualties less but somehow denser with the losses of people Katsura had come to know – from the Shinsengumi to the many residents of Kabukicho, who had fought not for galactic peace but for their homes, livelihood and friends. Katsura squeezes his eyes shut at night and wonders how Gintoki sleeps.

Then he remembers Shinpachi and Leader and allows himself to drift a little. They survived. They made it out of the carnage intact and didn’t, he hopes, leave too much of themselves behind.

*

“Oi, Zura.”

Fighting down a wave of irritation, Katsura turns to face Gintoki. “It’s not Zura, it’s Katsura. And why must we keep running into each other like this?”

“Hired for the same job, I guess.”

They’ve gathered at the distribution centre and disaster HQ to help unload food packages from the relief convoy. “No,” Katsura frowns. “This isn’t just a _job._ ”

“You and your duty,” Gintoki rolls his eyes. “But it’s a job all the same. And we’re Odd Jobs.”

From out of the corner of his eye, Katsura spies a pair of familiar figures and almost collapses from how relieved he is to see them as young and whole and alive as ever. He _does_ collapse, buckling to his knees when they crash tackle him in a hug. Even Sadaharu gives him a friendly bite on the head.

“Zura! We haven’t seen you since the fighting ended!”

More discreet, and a little more restrained but no less emotional, Shinpachi wraps him in a simple, heartfelt hug. “Katsura-san. I’m glad to see you well.”

He pats their backs and murmurs apologies, nothings that tumble off his tongue; and Gintoki knows them for what they are, yet he has the decency of mind to say nothing at all.

The last package is unloaded as twilight begins to fall. Katsura readies to go back, only for a warm hand to settle on his arm. “Come to dinner,” Kagura says, not a question or demand but something in between. Her eyes shine in the crepuscular light.  

“Don’t invite the home invader over,” Gintoki warns with his usual flavour of affected outrage. His previous quiet consideration had put Katsura on edge.

“He won’t be a home invader if he’s our guest,” Shinpachi points out.

“Zura’s always welcome,” admonishes Kagura. “Besides, we haven’t seen him in so long. You should be nicer to your friends, Gin-chan.”

“He’s not my _friend,_ ” Gintoki snaps in an entirely unconvincing way. “He’s a nuisance.”

“At your service,” Katsura salutes the two children, and they laugh delightedly. He’s glad, again, that they made it out with more than just their bodies.  

And if he can get a rise out of his former comrade, then it might be worth the visit. He isn’t likely to eat any better at the restaurants around his current apartment (and as lovely as Ikumatsu’s ramen is he would like some change). His hunger seals the deal, for good food and company, and a life he hasn’t had in too many years.

*

“Make yourself at home,” Shinpachi calls over his shoulder.

Gintoki scowls. “Please don’t.”

“This isn’t just _your_ home, Gin-chan.”

“Like I need the reminder.”

*

Dinner eaten and dishes sparkling, Shinpachi takes his leave for the day after a strict warning that there is to be _no_ tomfoolery or “friendly” sparring; he wants to return in the morning to an intact apartment.

“It’s different from last time, isn’t it?” Katsura wraps a hand around the cup of freshly brewed matcha like it’ll anchor him to the present, the here and now. Its warmth keeps the inner chill at bay. Lounging on the other sofa, Gintoki looks… better. His limbs are looser and his face more open, less like the shadow of the last war when he’d never let down his guard.

The window above the desk admits a sliver of cool, night air, the summer darkness still light and soft.

“Perhaps,” hedges his old comrade, just like old times. They’re _old_ now, him and Gintoki, having seen and done enough for a dozen lifetimes already. Their teacher had taught them that much, at least; been responsible for the lessons they’ll keep to their dying day. After the first war, Katsura had tried to protect Shouyou’s legacy the only way he knew how, and in the glorious, terrible burst of the second, he had tried and failed to protect Gintoki from cutting down the figure that had tormented him so.

“You took care of the ghosts,” Katsura says wryly.

Gintoku barely flinches. “I did what I had to do.” There is nothing like vindication in his tone, and again, Katsura is reminded this was not a victory, and if it was, then it rings in his ears like the golden staff of a man he’d once called Sensei.

He closes his eyes, and sips his tea. Quietly lowers himself back into the present. “Yes, you did. I’m glad you did. But that does not make me any less sorry you had to.”

Gintoki angles his head just so, hair catching the faint moonlight. It slides down and across his neck.

“Zura.” The name is soft and Katsura doesn’t correct him. “You didn’t fail, you know. You were there till the end. There was no way we could’ve saved him, so…” he spreads his hands in a gesture Katsura doesn’t quite know how to interpret. Imploring? Asking?   

Then, he knows. Something rises in his throat at the forgiveness offered to him. It seems appropriate that Katsura forgave Gintoki for the impossible choice of Sensei’s execution, and now Gintoki forgives him for a promise he had not been able to keep, but not through any fault of his own.  

They cannot change the past now, only move on. Katsura looks down at his own hands, and imagines not bombs or blood, but rice balls and mochi and maybe, later, incense to burn at the grave of someone they both cared for; even if the body they knew burnt to cinders and ashes long ago.

“I wish we had not had to pay so heavy a price.”

“That’s war for you,” Gintoki replies, and Katsura doesn’t know what else to say.

*

The rebuilding continues. Houses that were teetering come tumbling down, and from them rise brick foundations and steel frames to house old memories and new lives. Katsura does what he can, and helps who he can – ensuring his Joui men resettle into their civilian lives, directing orphaned children to families he knows have lost too much; feeding the stray cats who wind themselves around his legs out of whatever feline sense of kinship they share with him.

“You keep indulging those strays, brats or cats, and I’ll throw you out,” his landlord warns. Samurai in the Joui War or not, he lacks a samurai’s heart.

Still, Katsura takes them all, and tells the ones he cannot aid, “Go to Yorozuya Gin-chan. They will help you. You have my word.”

He’s not surprised to run into the Yorozuya at the new orphanage, a slapdash renovation of one of the disused training dojos on the outskirts of Kabukicho. Its roughhewn construction reflects the grim necessity of its birth, cobwebs and spiders still curled in corners.

But Katsura’s smile at the children is genuine, as is his laughter at the way they clamber all over Gintoki like a human version of a cat scratching post.

“Get off,” he wheezes, and they only comply to ambush Katsura and tug his hair.

“Hm,” smirks Gintoki. “Some of these runts told me a long-haired man sent them to us. Would you happen to know anything about that?” One overly-enthusiastic girl catches Katsura’s ear instead of his hair.

“Ow, careful.”

“Well, Zura? You in some secret wig-head vigilante club?”

Ensuring his grip is firm but not cruel, Katsura disengages the girl and settles her on the floor. “Not Zura, Katsura. And no, I’ve not had the fortune of meeting any other men with such distinguished grooming habits. Unlike someone else I know.”    

Kagura spots them from where she’s been braiding the hair of a girl who can’t be more than five. “Zura! Come have dinner with us again!”

Before Gintoki can get in a word edgewise, Shinpachi materialises by his side, glasses flashing. “Please come, Katsura-san.” He lowers his voice. “Gintoki forgot our pay _again_ this month.”

“I don’t have any choice, then,” Katsura declares.

*

“How is everything going now? Your landlord treating you well?” Shinpachi sets down three cups of tea and a plate of red bean mochi. Dishes picked clean and Kagura tucked into her closet, the three remaining men – for Shinpachi is less and less a boy, to Katsura’s combined guilt and relief – sit in the living area.

Out of the other two, Shinpachi has not yet, not _had_ to learn how to guard his emotions even among those he trusts; he frowns at the description of the four-and-a-half-tatami room Katsura is renting, crease deepening when he describes the cracked sink and mouldy corners, the draft that gets under the door into his futon.

“You should find yourself a proper place,” Shinpachi says with some force.

“Only when everyone else has one,” returns Katsura. He catches a glint of red from Gintoki as he tilts his head, apparently to let the wind ruffle his hair. For Katsura, who has all but deciphered his old comrade’s body language, it’s the equivalent of a red flag. He would be touched if he weren’t annoyed for the undue concern he’s being shown.

“You are very kind, but I cannot afford to move out. Yet,” he adds the last word in part to appease Shinpachi, and flash a warning to Gintoki.

The cicadas begin their nightly chorus. “It’s getting late,” Shinpachi remarks, and finishes the rest of his tea. “I told Ane-ue I’d be back by nine. Don’t think this conversation is over!” he directs to Katsura before leaving.  

The quiet settles back around them, not exactly comfortable but close enough that Katsura revels in the illusion.

“It would’ve been nice if saving the universe came with an actual place to live.” Gintoki snags one of the mochi and chews it open-mouthed. Some things never change.

“Liberation,” Katsura murmurs, a shade ironically. “That was enough.”

The second mochi vanishes into the depths of Gintoki’s mouth. “There’s not enough red bean paste in these,” he complains. “That’s what you get for store-bought. The old dessert places were better. You can’t rush perfection.”

Katsura takes a slow sip of his tea. “There’s all the time in the world now.”

The loud-mouthed chewing fades to background static, twined around the murmuring of the cicadas. The rest of their lives in a field of peace, golden and autumnal, flashes before his eyes. Possibilities bloom. The kind of freedom Katsura had fought for he now has, in name if not in spirit. He knows this.

In reality: he sees scorched husks, remnants of weapons. The girl in the orphanage. Letters and messages never sent, goodbyes cut short. All the people he’d let in without knowing –

“I did not think this was how the war would end,” he confesses.  

For so long he had harboured within himself the idea of victory, the death throes of the Bakufu, until Utsuro overturned it all. And then he hadn’t had time to recalibrate his expectations of what it meant to win, not knowing _if_ they would win.     

Gintoki is quiet for a moment, still. Cicadas trill, high and moon-drunk.

“This is the good ending, Zura,” he says. “Not like last time.”

*

The third time’s the charm, or so they say.

“Come live with us,” Kagura offers when they’re potting plants at Hedoro’s store (an apology, of sorts, from Gintoki) and everything is quiet save the damp swish of the sprinklers and the gentle humming from Hedoro himself.

Holding a trowel and eyes as hard and grounded as the packed earth in the pots, she is a different creature to Shinpachi and his gentle, ocean-lapping insistence. He gets the faintest feeling they’re conspiring against him.

“Hang on a second,” Gintoki hisses, then lowers his voice as the horned head swings towards them ponderously. “You can’t go around making those sorts of decisions when I’m the one paying the rent.”

Shinpachi raises his head from where he’s been repotting a shrub with purple berries. “Gin-san, when have you ever paid?”

“And last I looked,” adds Kagura, triumphant, “ _you_ didn’t own the place. Granny does.”

“You don’t own it either.”

“Granny likes me more than you.”

“But she likes me more than wig-head over there.”

Playing the mediator, Shinpachi opts for the easy way. “We all like Katsura-san, don’t we?” Gintoki’s half-hearted rebuttal falls flat when he realises the indisputable truth of the statement, and that the present company can see through his performances in a flash.

“Temporarily,” he concedes. “Until he can find someplace better.”

Katsura clears his throat. “Excuse me. I don’t remember agreeing to this.” Far be it that he wants, more than he should, to move in with the Yorozuya, but he feels at the same time it would be intruding on their – the word escapes him, momentarily – family.

Two pairs of confused eyes descend on him. “Are you sure?” Shinpachi exchanges a quick glance with Kagura. “Where you’re staying now – it doesn’t sound like the best place.”

Not having the heart to lie, Katsura mumbles an agreement. He senses the expectancy of the children, their potential disappointment. They want him around, as strange as it seems. To them, he is not a terrorist or hero, rebel or saviour; he is a friend. Katsura watches Gintoki feigning disinterest in his reply, and realises that it was through their eyes that he made the decision.

He _has_ changed, and it’s different to the last war, but a better kind of different. A better ending. A small pulse of warmth worms its way underneath Katsura’s skin. The leaves of the plant he is tending to unfurl, just a bit.

“All right,” Katsura smiles. “I’ll stay with you.”  


End file.
